[I had actually written this back in 2006, but as one of
my earliest blogs on a prior site it did not make the transition to Blogger,
the current site. In its prior format I
also reviewed Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, which I’ll leave aside
for now. Both were dull books which I
only finished by sheer determination.]
I started this in junior high, picked it up sometime in
college (and got no further) and finally picked it up a third time years out of
law school and finally finished it. The
problem is that the first half of the book is autobiographical and extremely
dull. The second half is where it starts
to finally get interesting. As most
German speakers & writers are dense and verbose, and Hitler is no
exception, I naturally had to read an English translation.
Mind you, Hitler held no political office before taking
power in 1933 and had little in the way of education in 1914 before joining the
Imperial German Army. Reading his own
words, you get the benefit of a one-sided conversation with Hitler himself
(though most accounts indicate that his tendency was to dominate conversations
anyway and not pay much attention to what anyone was trying to tell him).
My own politics, restated yet again, are libertarian, and
thus I have no inherent sympathy for national socialism, per se, or any
doctrine advocating a totalitarian dictatorship. By the time I read it completely I had
developed my sympathies for libertarianism and read Atlas Shrugged
multiple times. The symbolism of Nazism,
its swastikas, sigrunes and totenkopfs, are all well and fine, but fall well
short of the critical mass necessary to convince anyone to actually embrace the
ideology itself.
Having said all that, how would I summarize Mein Kampf,
for those of us unlikely to elicit anywhere near the excessive patience
required to digest the whole damn thing? Aside from hating Jews and France, did
he have anything else of interest to say?
Actually, yes…
1. Hitler
loved England and had phenomenal admiration for Great Britain. Britain, as a sea power with its Royal Navy
and farflung overseas empire, was not necessarily at odds with Germany. He actually criticized the Kaiser for trying
to compete with Britain on the seas and with colonies abroad, a strategy which
turned out poorly during WWI; did Germany truly derive any benefit from its
empire? Discuss. Hitler’s peace offering
to Churchill in June 1940 was likely sincere, especially since he had that
quest for lebensraum in the East to pursue and could use a few more divisions
in that direction instead of guarding against an Allied invasion of Europe.
2. Of course,
Hitler hated France. As a land
power, France was a threat and a competitor to Germany in Europe. Moreover, the French could at least be proud
of Napoleon and his brief empire. There
would be no chance of peace with France if Hitler was running things. And as we well know, Hitler defeated France
and took that brief tour of Paris.
3. Growing up
in Austria-Hungary, and in Vienna in particular, Hitler witnessed
firsthand the chaos of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its parliament,
hopelessly deadlocked with a multitude of different nationalities speaking
different languages and at cross purposes.
Mind you, our own Founding Fathers felt that such an environment would
prevent “tyranny of the majority” as no one group could dominate the rest. Of course, Hitler had no background in US
history, nor did he read any Marxist literature. I guess his time in prison was spent dictating
to Rudolf Hess instead of reading anything useful besides the newspaper. If he had little patience to listen to anyone
besides himself, what chance was there that he would have the patience to read
what anyone else had to argue – especially anything resembling an opposing
viewpoint. He certainly wasn’t about to
read the Federalist or Anti-Federalist papers or anything by an advocate of
democracy and freedom.
4. The flip
side of this is that Hitler was convinced that the arduous process of taking
power would ensure, in a Darwinian sense, that only the best and fittest would
succeed at becoming dictator. By that
time (1924-25) Mussolini was in power in Italy, but Stalin had yet to
consolidate power in Russia after Lenin’s death in 1924. No bad dictators? Enlightened despots? We’ll see, won’t we?
5. Hitler
also predicted that the US would eclipse Great Britain as a world power. Certainly true, and so far as I can tell,
very much ahead of the curve in making this prediction. And with the US successfully taking on Nazi
Germany in France, Belgium, and Germany itself, AND island hopping through the
Pacific against the Japanese at the same time, and finally building not one,
but TWO atomic bombs AND successfully dropping them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
surely the US proved him right on this issue – to his detriment and at his
expense, along with Japan’s.
As noted in my prior blog on Trump, I don’t know any Nazis
personally, nor am I aware of anyone who read this book and emerged as a Nazi
as a result. He certainly didn’t
persuade me, either of national socialism or of anti-semitism, which strikes me
as gratuitous hate for its own sake. For
that matter, I never bothered to even attempt to read Das Kapital, and on
that side of the spectrum, the Communist Manifesto is succinct enough for
its stated purpose. Atlas Shrugged,
as long, verbose, and overindulgent as it may have been, did succeed at
converting me to the libertarian cause.
My understanding is that Mein Kampf was liberally distributed in
Nazi Germany but few bothered to actually read it.
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